Published by ZDNet Australia, November 15 2002

Still trying to decide whether your enterprise development architecture should be based around Sun's Java or Microsoft's .NET? Perhaps you should be more worried about whether either of them is going to work at all.

To date, around 70 percent of initial Java implementations have been unsuccessful, according to new research from Gartner Group.

"An inordinately large number of large-scale Java projects have been failures," said Mark Driver, Gartner research director for Internet and ebusiness technologies.

However, Microsoft shouldn't draw any comfort from those figures as it seeks to promote its .NET technology strategy either. In all likelihood, the failure rate for early implementations of .NET systems will be similar, Driver said.

"The only practical way to mitigate the risk [of a failed implementation] is to outsource development."

Despite those problems for early adopters, Gartner is predicting that by 2005, the battle for enterprise development supremacy will be a neck-and-neck two horse race, with Java and .NET each commanding around 40 percent of the market.

"Most larger organisations are going to have both platforms," said Driver. "They have become de facto standards." Both Microsoft and Sun have recently confessed to flaws in their overall strategy.

Earlier this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates admitted that the company's promotion of .NET had been premature.

Sun meanwhile has finally managed to achieved admission to the Web Services Interoperability Organisation, but hasn't yet achieved its ambition of a board seat.